Dan Savage on how Halloween has sort of become ‘Pride’ for us straight folks:
I’m often asked—confronted—about gay pride parades when I speak at colleges and universities. Usually it’s a conservative student, typically someone who isn’t happy about my being invited to campus in the first place. We gay people like to pretend that we’re all about love and marriage, the conservative student will insist, but look at your pride parades! Look at those guys in assless chaps and all those bare-chested lesbians dancing! Just look! The exchange almost always ends with this:
Conservative student: “Straight people don’t flaunt our sexuality like that. We don’t have straight ‘pride’ parades.”
Me: “You should.”
…
You made a good choice, straight people, a better one than the booze companies were trying to make for you. Whereas the pride parade is now the big public celebration of queer sexuality with all its squalor and glamour, Halloween is now the big public celebration of straight sexuality, of heterosexual desire, every bit—tit?—as squalid and glamorous.
We don’t resent you for taking Halloween as your own. We know what it’s like to keep your sexuality under wraps, to keep it concealed, to be on your guard and under control at all times. While you don’t suffer anywhere near the kind of repression we did (and in many times and places still do), straight people are sexually repressed, too. You move through life thinking about sex, constantly but keenly aware that social convention requires you to act as if sex were the last thing on your mind. Exhausting, isn’t it? It makes you long for moments when you can let it all hang out, when you can violate the social taboos you honor most of the rest of time, when you can be the piece of meat you are and treat other people like the pieces of meat they are.
It’s that kind of pressure—pressure to conform and maintain—that makes you want to pull on a pair of assless chaps and march down the street, the kind of pressure that cries out for some form of organized mass release. It’s the kind of pressure that a pride parade—straight or gay, Mardi Gras or Halloween—can release.
The post’s title, while clearly a nod to Dan Savage’s feature (I encourage you to read the entire thing) is also a nod to my gay and lesbian peers who will be celebrating Pride this weekend.
Having been in the thick of a few Pride parades (including an epic one at Southern Decadence in New Orleans I’ll discuss in a bit) I can tell you first hand, the gays know how to throw one hell of a party.
But I didn’t always feel this way.
When I attended Southern Decadence that year, I was a budding deviant: growing more accepting of my appreciation for conventionally ‘feminine’ aesthetics (corsets, makeup and knee high boots) I was excited to finally be in an environment where I could look like a character out of Rocky Horror Picture Show without anyone batting an eyelash.
And for that, my experience there was incredible; to be appreciated and embraced for my queer proclivities, as opposed to being sneered at and heckled (which happened while we were on the way) was an amazing feeling.
But at the time, the unabashed sexuality of the entire scene caught me completely off guard. Sure, I had done the whole Spring Break and Mardi Gras ’show us your tits’ thing but to see a traveling, nurse themed, gloryhole set up, I can admit, as a young straight… I just wasn’t ready for it.
In fact… I was genuinely offended by it.
My argument was similar to the conservative student Dan Savage used in his feature…
“Straight people would never do or could even get away with something like this,” I mused angrily (and stupidly) to my best friend later that day.
Smarter, more mature and more of a deviant than I ever anticipated three years ago, I say the same thing Dan does… we should.
While the little Goth kid in me cries a bit at what mainstream culture has turned Halloween into, it delights me that otherwise upstanding straights across the country have used the holiday as an excuse to indulge their carnal and sexual impulses.
As ‘deviant’ as I am being poly, being vociferously sex positive and being relatively gender fluid (at least from an aesthetic standpoint) I will never and my fellow straights will never, face the sort of social adversity gay people have and continue to face.
But we face various pressures of sexual repression in our own right, particularly as we get older. The whimsical spirit of Halloween is the perfect environment for us to get drunk and engage in a delicious poor decision or two (just remember… safer sex practices are your friend).
I always have a good laugh at those people who groan every year about how Halloween just gives woman an excuse to dress (and subsequently behave) ’slutty.’
To which I respond… and?
Not that I believe anyone needs an excuse to be (ethically) slutty but if Halloween gives an otherwise buttoned up woman an opportunity to loosen up a bit, if only for a day or a weekend, why should she deny herself?
Dan Savage suggested it and now I do too… let’s get some Pride of our own this Halloween straight people.
This will be your last chance at decadence and self-indulgence before you have to suffer fools family gladly for Thanksgiving and Christmas (I’ll have to play polite with my family that day before eating Chinese food and watching movies with my partner like a good Jew) and you should take full advantage of it.
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